


Falling Forward

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Love Confessions, M/M, pining shiro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 19:44:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10170413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: Shiro is a romantic catastrophe, even with an excellent wingman like Pidge.





	

**Author's Note:**

> based off of ftlosd's [wonderful, absolutely charming sheith comic.](https://ftlosd.tumblr.com/post/156644931651/this-was-a-bad-idea-here-put-the-flowers-in)

The first time that Shiro tried to flirt with Keith, he’d failed so miserably that everyone but Keith himself felt the burn of his shame.

Like a mushroom cloud fanning out into the sky after a chemical explosion, or the first tremors crawling over the ground before the eruption of an earthquake, Shiro felt the embarrassment rolling off of him in thick, paralyzing waves. He felt as though he was frozen in his horror, as though time itself had scraped to a jarring halt to sit and ponder just how terribly he’d messed up.

He’d meant to clap Keith on the back and tell him just how good of a job he’d done after a mission, but then Keith was peering up at him from under sweaty, disheveled bangs. The sun had hit his eyes in a way that made them sparkle splintered shades of violet and blue—like a kaleidoscope of different hues that Shiro never knew were possible in humans. His lips had been full and red, worried between pearly teeth during their battle, indented with the angry red marks that Shiro had to resist the urge to run a healing tongue over. His skin had glowed a lively peach—the apples of his cheeks flushed pink, the red of his lips and the brilliant blue-gray-purple of his eyes framed by dark, unruly hair in the most mesmerizing picture Shiro had ever laid eyes on.

And he’d choked.  

He’d taken a dive for the moment, skimmed his fingers against the edges of it, and watched in horror as it bounded far, far out of reach.

“U-uh, Keith—” He’d worked around the inflated, fat weight of his tongue in his mouth. He’d swallowed down the excess spit and the substantial lump of anxiety in his throat. “You—you… Good.”

A perfect, thick dark brow raised in curiosity. Those full lips had puffed out in a confused pout. Lance had breathed in to unleash one of his obnoxious guffaws, and somewhere behind Shiro—as the world had faded and blurred around him and nothing seemed real but Keith’s judging eyes narrowing up at him before he’d huffed and turned away—he could hear Lance’s pained breath, like the air deflating a balloon, as Pidge elbowed him in the gut.

And maybe that was when Pidge decided to help him. Maybe that was when she, along with everyone else, surely, decided that Shiro was a lost cause without a little push in the right direction.

“No one is perfect,” she’d told him later, smoothing out the sore edges of his ego with a gentle hand against his arm, “everyone’s bad at something, and you’re just bad at this.”

_ This _ , of course, was wooing his oldest friend. It was articulating the sort of pick-up line that would make it indefinitely clear what his motivation was—what he expected of their relationship. What he wanted from both of them in the end.  _ This _ was telling Keith that they’d grown far too close for those terrible, intrusively romantic thoughts to leave him alone late at night. It was finally admitting that Keith’s smile and his laugh, his endless determination, his quiet, earnest love for each of them and the rough edges that Shiro adored too much to ever smooth out had him absolutely dumbfounded with emotion.

_ This _ was finally confessing how he’d felt all along—it was pushing down his foolish pride and the insecurities about himself in comparison to the sort of person that Keith truly deserved—and it was telling Keith that maybe once everything was said and done, when Zarkon was defeated and they were finally allowed to go back to Earth, it might be worth it for the two of them to spend the rest of their boring lives together.

It didn’t seem like a lot to ask—not in theory. In theory, Lance did that sort of thing all the time. People did, generally. They found someone who they considered to be attractive enough, or funny enough, or nice enough that they wouldn’t mind spending some time with them. They asked them out for coffee. They asked them out to dinner. They shoved the torn off corners of napkins with crudely-written phone numbers into the hands of unwitting strangers and waited for them to call.

In a normal universe filled with normal people, admitting that you had a thing for someone else was commonplace. In the abnormal, endless recesses of space, trapped in a semi-haunted alien ship with six other people, maybe things were a little bit more complicated.

“Listen,” Pidge told him, running a hand through her hair and tugging in agitation at the puffy, split ends, “It’s not that bad, Shiro. I promise. Keith likes you more than he likes everyone else. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

Shiro dropped his head into his hands, sloping his shoulders in a vain attempt to melt down into the couch. All by themselves in the big, empty common area, he felt as though even the shadows in the corner were judging his cowardice. He felt as though, in that moment, maybe he was even smaller than Allura’s mice. Honestly, considering their usual level of bravery, it would be an insult to even compare himself to them.

“He could yell at me,” he said, voice muffled against his palms, “He could accuse me of only being nice to him because I wanted to date him. He could call me a pervert and refuse to speak to me ever again. Pidge, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to leave Voltron. Who in their right mind would want to follow a leader who—”

“Okay, okay.” Pidge raised a hand to silence him, pinching the bridge of her nose under her glasses with the other. The slits of green under her eyelids were judging him as well, calculating all possible outcomes, scrambling to figure out a reasonable conclusion to Shiro’s current predicament that might yield the least amount of risks.

“You and I both know that’s not going to happen, Shiro. Keith cares too much about Voltron to ditch us even if he does have a problem with you, which—”

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, a strange, mysterious smile playing against her lips.

“I really doubt Keith is going to get mad at you.”

He didn’t have the nerve to ask her to elaborate, and instead opted to lean back against the couch and tip back his head. He traced the lines in the ceiling, focusing on the fuzzy edges of the shadows, trying to remember exactly how Keith’s hair had looked against his reddened skin when he’d gazed up at him on the battlefield. Even with the angry little cuts against his face—the dirt and the sweat, the blood caked in the crevices of his wounds—he’d looked absolutely angelic. Breathtaking, even, as though his pensive frown at Shiro’s harebrained compliment had punched him right in the stomach.

He tried to imagine the way that Keith’s features might screw up if he ever got the nerve to come clean. He thought about the way that Keith’s frown would tug somehow deeper, how the lines of his face would warp from confusion to distaste, to the realization that Shiro wasn’t someone who he could trust after all. He would close himself off then, Shiro thought. He would hastily build back up all of those walls that they’d worked for so many years to tear down.

Brick by brick, he’d exposed the captivating light that lay dormant beneath Keith’s many protective layers, and with just one feeble sentence, with just one inappropriate confession, he could undo all of it at once.

Keith was not an easy nut to crack. He wasn’t the sort of person who would cave under just anyone’s touch so easily. Shiro thought about telling Pidge this, he thought about telling her just how hard it had been to confront him in the first place—how difficult it was to win his trust, to convince him to let someone else in. It had been a constant uphill battle against Keith’s mistrust. It had been like slamming raw fists against the unforgiving bricks of an endless, daunting wall. He’d enjoyed every moment of it, sure. He’d gotten a certain level of pleasure out of chasing Keith, out of reaching past the thorny layers of his heart to reach the beauty that he’d kept trapped so securely inside of himself, but losing all of that—he wasn’t sure if he could do it again.

And he wasn’t even sure if Keith would give him a second chance, if he risked everything just to inevitably ruin things between them.

He had a feeling that Pidge knew anyway, even if he didn’t tell her. She seemed to understand that Keith didn’t open up to just anyone. She had to grasp the concept that weaseling his way into Keith’s good graces hadn’t been as easy as just saying hi. She had to know, because she’d met him too. She’d reached out at times to meet only his thick barricade of defenses. She’d learned in time that he was too wrapped up in his cautious, protective aloofness to realize that not every touch from a stranger was going to hurt.

Maybe she didn’t understand why, but she had to know anyway. And she had to realize that it wouldn’t be as easy as just telling Keith how he felt. Keith was a firecracker, and there was no telling how he’d react if he didn’t feel the same way.  

“You know,” Pidge said suddenly, after enough time had passed that her voice startled Shiro out of his thoughts, “I think Allura mentioned that our next mission is going to be on a planet with an ecosystem similar to Earth’s. Do you think Keith likes flowers?”

The thought had never struck him before. He had no idea.

But the mission rolled around, and somewhere between fighting off the Galra and rescuing the innocent people of another planet, Pidge had managed to collect a bouquet of startling scarlet flowers, so similar to the lilies back home that Shiro had to question why the people there didn’t look more human.

She’d smuggled them onto the ship privately, avoiding Allura and Coran’s view with an expert level of precision that worried him a little—if only because he wasn’t sure how she’d gotten so good at that sort of thing, and it had him wondering what else she’d sneaked on without any of them realizing. Surely, he told himself, if they were working with some sort of pay grade, she deserved a raise.

She’d shoved them into his hands later on, an impish smile beamed up at him. She’d told him only,  _ “You need to give these to him before they wither”, _ and she’d shoved him in the direction of the common area with startling strength.

With Pidge nothing but an unshakable force behind him, and the blob of Keith’s figure slouched against the couch with a book in his hands, Shiro suddenly felt a heightened sense of vertigo—as though the ship were switching into hyperdrive unannounced. As though, somehow, even the floor beneath his feet and Pidge’s tiny hands pressed against his back were shifting uncontrollably around him.

Through the doorway, it seemed as though Keith hadn’t even noticed them. He flipped a page, focused more on the pictures than the alien text—wasting his time distracting himself from his boredom and ignoring the urge to head over to the training deck for the sake of his aching muscles.

Shiro watched his subtle movements, took in the way that his eyes glazed over as he lost himself in thought. He watched the way that his damp hair—fresh and clean from the shower, surely smelling like the hyper-sweet lavender of Altean shampoo—curled as the tips as it dried, how it clung to his forehead and looped around the collar of his shirt. He took in how Keith’s long fingers worked out the creases in the pages, his dull-edged nails scraping against the parchment. He watched the way that Keith chewed on his lip, never giving his skin the rest that it deserved, always tittering about nervously during their downtime between fights as though even his body couldn’t handle sitting still for too long.

He dragged in a breath, holding it in his lungs for a few scattered heartbeats. He breathed out slowly, closing his eyes and dropping his head.

“Patience yields focus,” he told himself—because those were the words that he’d told Keith before. Those were the words that held so much meaning between them; a phrase that somehow managed to shoulder the weight of everything that he meant to Keith, and everything that Keith meant to him.

Pidge mirrored his statement behind him—a dull echo in the back of his muddled thoughts.

“I can do this.” he said.

“You can do this!”

He glanced up again—a tremendous mistake. He took in the way that Keith was propping his head against a closed fist, how he held the book closer to his face. He watched those worn-out lips jutting out, muttering quiet words to himself and the emptiness around him—so innocent and still so beautiful, so dangerous and untouchable even doing something as mundane as skimming through a book. Like a caged lion, maybe, or the flame flickering in a lantern. Keith could burn straight through anything if he cut himself loose. He could take down anyone in his path. And Shiro wondered if he was willing to get his fingers burned—if he was strong enough to consume that fire without allowing it to burn him from the inside out.

Keith flipped another page. Shiro took a step back, folding in on himself in shame—trembling like the leaves of forest trees desperate to escape a raging fire.

“I can’t do it, Pidge.” his voice didn’t even sound familiar in his own ears.

He shoved the bouquet into her hands, ignoring the way that she argued—fists balled up at her sides.

“This was a bad idea,” he told her, still shaking, dying to stave off his shame somewhere dark and alone where he could ferment in his own misery. “Here—p-put the flowers in water. I need to go… clear my head.”

And the second time, much like the first, ended in insurmountable failure.

He felt his many attempts piling up like the humorous images in some kind of pathetic movie montage. He’d tried to face Keith so many times that the flowers curled up and dried away. He couldn’t even look him in the face—couldn’t even compliment his good work after a mission without sputtering so incoherently that it didn’t even sound like he was speaking English anymore.

He’d told Pidge eventually, after a week of grueling failed attempts at courting that left him feeling more pathetic than anything ever had before, “I think it’s just not meant to be. Maybe I just need to accept that I’m too much of a coward and let things happen naturally.”

Pidge was sprawled out on her back on the common area couch. She was lifting one leg high in the air, holding it there for a few breaths, then dropping it down onto the cushions. She cocked her head to the side, watching him through the glasses sitting askew on her nose.

“You just need to get out of your head,” she told him, “you need to stop thinking of him as  _ ‘Keith: the guy I’m madly in love with’, _ and realize that he’s just  _ ‘Keith: the guy that I’ve known for years who still likes me even though I can’t say an entire sentence to him anymore without drooling all over myself’ _ .”

Shiro shot her an exasperated frown, before rubbing a hand over his face to work away the headache currently bubbling up between his eyebrows.

“I’m going to get something to drink,” he told her, pushing himself up, “I need to think about things.”

She made a noncommittal noise, raising the other leg in the air before dropping it down. It was getting late anyway—close enough to their bedtime that everyone seemed to be loping about in a dull exhaustion, desperate to squeeze as much living out of their free time before the next day’s mission as they could.

His footsteps echoed through empty halls. Somewhere far-off, he could hear Lance and Hunk laughing and joking. Allura and Coran were nowhere to be found, and Keith—God, his face felt hot even thinking about him—must have already went to bed. The training deck looked to be empty.

However, when he finally reached the kitchen, he realized that he was wrong. Keith’s back facing him across the room was enough to shove his heart right up into his throat. He could feel it pounding there, as though if he were to open his mouth, it would tumble out and heave pitifully on the floor.

Before he could ease his way out—before he could sneak away with his tail between his legs in an attempt at sparing the last of his dignity after a long day of fighting and another long day tomorrow, Keith’s voice called out to him, but he didn’t turn around.

“The trash compactor is broken,” he said simply, deadpan. “It’s spitting up on the floor.”

Finally, he turned, slow-motion, his eyes dark and all-consuming, sucking in Shiro’s attention and stealing the breath from his lungs. In his hands, he held the gnarled, jagged edges of Shiro’s dead bouquet. There was a smattering of color hot against his cheeks.

“These are yours, aren’t they? I saw you carrying them around before.”

He felt caught in the coiled threads of time. He felt like an insect trapped in a spider’s web. He felt as though all life around them had slowed down and stopped, as though he himself were moving through molasses as he struggled to catch up with the current moment and actually answer Keith’s question.

The hum of the lights overhead felt deafening. The sound of his veins pushing blood behind his ears sounded like the kick of a bass drum. Slowly—far too slow to be read as anything but completely abnormal, slow enough that Keith was already raising an aggravated brow—Shiro dragged his eyes from Keith’s face to the flowers in his hands. He cleared his throat loudly, sucking in as many tiny breaths as he could manage before jerking his head away.

“They’re yours, actually.” He said. Keith twitched at his cryptic statement. He could practically feel the anger rolling off of him in waves. “I—I mean… they were meant… for you.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Keith picking at the dead petals of one of the flowers. There was an emotion currently twisting about on his face that Shiro couldn’t put a name to.

“There weren’t flowers in the desert,” he said eventually, tugging one of the petals free and inspecting it, “I missed them.”

Before Shiro could manage human speech, Keith was speaking again.

“You don’t have to keep avoiding me, you know,” he said, still not looking up—tossing one petal to the floor and plucking off another, “You could just tell me that you like me and we could date.”

Shiro felt ice shoot up his spine. He sputtered momentarily, raising up his hands in front of him as though that might chase away his own humiliation. He objected, for only a fraction of a moment, before cursing quietly and rubbing the back of his head.

“I didn’t think it was that easy—”

“Of course it’s that easy.”

Keith’s eyes flicked up, taking him in—his pupils expanding out, so wide in the dim light that they’d nearly engulfed his irises.

“I didn’t spend all of that time chasing you just because I liked you as a friend.”

Shiro took a moment, between the time that Keith dropped the bouquet before stepping forward and pulling down his face, to contemplate that maybe they were two planets—endlessly revolving around the same sun. Maybe time had shaped them into two people who would always cross paths, two beings that could never pull too far away without bouncing back together again.

And maybe, during all of the time that he’d been worrying about loving Keith, Keith had loved him too—and he’d been too blinded by his insecurities to notice it.

Maybe, at the end of the day, he didn’t need to try so hard, because in the end, flirting never worked for him anyway.

Keith kissed him gently, with the soft heat of a flame flickering against the glass of a lantern—with the strength of a tiger pressing mighty claws through its cage.

And eventually, after so much time had passed, he pulled away and smiled.

Saying, finally,  _ “I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me too?” _

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been sort of... fangirling over ftlosd's work for some time now, and I really loved [this particular comic](https://ftlosd.tumblr.com/post/156644931651/this-was-a-bad-idea-here-put-the-flowers-in). Luckily, they were very sweet when I asked if I could write about it, so... I might have gotten a little too excited and wrote all of this in one sitting, but... I won't tell if you don't.
> 
> I should probably be really embarrassed about this, but I kept listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgOeGpwTTag) on an endless repeat while writing, so... oh well. 
> 
> Anyway, I really hope you liked it! Thank you so much for reading!
> 
>  **Edit** : Months later, I'm returning to link some [very beautiful fanart](http://cinnamonrollusagi.tumblr.com/post/163917372944/inspired-by-this-fic-x-please-check-out-my-ko-fi) that [cinnamonrollusagi](http://cinnamonrollusagi.tumblr.com/) drew, inspired by this story!


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